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Peace is active, not passive. You can’t sit back and wait for peace to come to you. You must work for it. You must shake off your apathy and demand it. This is not always easy in a culture of war, such as we have in the U.S., but it is necessary.

It is clear that war makes great demands on its participants. We need to think of peace in the same way. Peace is not the absence of war or the space between wars; it is a goal to be achieved by actively demanding that the world’s governments find nonviolent means of settling disputes.

— The Sun Magazine “Indefensible,” David Krieger, interviewed by Leslee Goodman, January 2013 ::: reprinted in the “One Nation, Indivisible” section July 2018

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

Yes, we have to take from the natural world , whether it’s trees for houses or animals and plants for food and clothing. But there’s a limit. We can’t just exploit the whole planet for short-term gain.

Think of any big city. Now imagine you put a dome over it. Don’t let anything out or in. How long could it last? Where will the oxygen come from to replenish what’s being consumed? Where will the water come from? Where will the emissions from all the cars go? Where will the food come from?

The planet is a contained system like that domed city. In just a short timewe’ve managed to change the chemistry of the atmosphere, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide. The ocean has been a great buffer againstthe excess CO2 we’ve generated, but when carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean, it turns into carbonic acid. As a result, the ocean is becoming measurably more acidic. This is not good news. All the life in the ocean — from microbes and phytoplankton to fish and whales — is like an orchestra playing away. It’s taken 4.5 billion years to get this orchestra to play ion harmony, and here we come along and consciously disrupt it. What are we thinking? Why would we do such a thing?

— The Sun Magazine (article direct link), “Sunken Treasure: Sylvia Earle on Why We Need to Protect the Oceans,” interviewed by Michael Shapiro, July 2018. Sylvia Earle (b. 1938) is an eminent oceanographer and marine biologist. See the article intro for details of her biography and C.V.

“The man who knows when he has enough is rich beyond measure,” — Lao Tzu

Whatever mind does, the practicing of stillness, silence, and deep breathing, like in meditation, has a powerful salutary effect.

I got ’round to making a Recommended Bloggers page on Lost in Mist, my main poetry blog since 2012 ( lostinmist.wordpress.com ).

Used up all my postcards in the Discordian Postcard Conspiracy project a few days ago after 3 and a half years. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it will stop entirely. A post on the last series done will probably be forthcoming in the coming days.

I’ve started the long process of blowing away old reblogs and crap posts from the Lost in Mist blog. Which may eventually improve my search visibility. [ongoing]

I’m now mainly offline at home, having lost my smartphone. It has greatly reduced my stress and boosted my productivity and focus. Check out this podcast/radio show on the toxic aspects of smartphones: https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/614007696/attention-please Here is an article I read last year on My Life Without a Smartphone – LA Times . I’d thought it was in The Atlantic, but I only came up with these manifold results from there: https://www.theatlantic.com/search/?q=my+life+without+a+smartphone . I still keep NPR on too much, though. And m.cnn.com/en is the only news site I’ve found so far that works well (text only) on a flip phone (this is a 2018 flip phone) so far. Fortunately the list of stories doesn’t update or expand too often throughout the day. I will be glad of the day Trump’s gone so there won’t be one colossal scandal story hogging all the airtime and textspace every week, week in, week out (one hopes, anyway).

I have also been purging email boxes and email subscriptions more intensively recently. It’s beginning to look like the process may have an end* !

And I am on my 32nd day sober, while also still employed, for once.

There have also been some presentational and other minor changes at Psychic Fugue Studio ; code improvements more so than contents. [ongoing]

And I’ve started doing artwork in earnest again after many years. Trying to get some pieces finished…

Words flow in hot process
No space left to cover eyesThe Everything bursts into the mental framework
What is seen is unchanged
All is clarity
Where is the wellspring of Nature’s mathematics?
Who do you permit to define things for you?

And on what, if any, reasoning?
Swerve left for justice
Step on every crack for Logic
Pray to the [insert ‘higher power’ here]s to ward off superstition
Feel your mind open like a child’s
The ball in your hand is the sun
Yet mosquitoes can’t be evaded
In the second place, the body
In the first, whence you came from before you were conceived

Message of the Week – 1.19-1.30.2018

There is magic at work in the world –
Yet it is unseen
It works not the way the movies do

[…] When a woman with only a styrofoam sword and costume faery wings can drive a line of 200 riot police back two steps by her words […]

Still somewhat conflicted on publishing what I wrote from a random seed on 1/19, but it had been too long. I wonder what people think? :
That is a wheel (to go, etc) and a jester/joker/trickster hat. I have also since struck the male/female symbols from my symbol group (replaced with a puzzle piece and a skull, for the moment). There have been several revisions to the ‘lexicon’ since starting on it in October 2016. I may have found my final version. Not sure.

Quote(s) of the Week

e^iπ + 1 = 0

And Benjamin Peirce, a noted American 19th-century philosopher, mathematician, and professor at Harvard University, after proving Euler’s identity during a lecture, stated that the identity “is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth”.[8]
[…]
Euler’s identity is often cited as an example of deep mathematical beauty.[3] Three of the basic arithmetic operations occur exactly once each: addition, multiplication, and exponentiation. The identity also links five fundamental mathematical constants:[4]
[…]
Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin has said, “like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence”.[5]

Message of the Week 1.16.2018

Loop by loop the floating signpost ran
In and between
Across & throughout
Neither circle nor spiral
Neither linear or exponential
Never repeating
Yet also bounded

With blinding speed the world’s wisdom freshened up
Who runs the Bingo?
Who runs your Thermodynamic?
Reach not for arrows, but for clovers
Slip on some pockets and jump out the door

Quote of the week

Taylor had fallen asleep with headphones on, behind the driver’s seat. Dorothea was telling a story about a woman who built a house in the middle of a never-ending landslide, and her story made their car go 300 miles per hour. Kawashima was busy driving.

[…]

Ernesto’s response: “We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.”

I found this book in a Little Free Library (littlefreelibrary.org). I would give it a 10 out of 5 for magic and a 6 of 5 for sci-fi. The story and all that is also cool, but fiction critic is not among my skills. (Disclaimer: this is not meant to imply that magic works this way in the real world…. AFAIK)

Message of the Week 1.10.2018

The Person of Mother Gaia, the Self of
_ Spider Mother, the Identity of Star
__ Goddess, the Being of Human, the
___ Consciousness of Superorganism, the Ego
____ of Dolphin, the Spirit of Microbe,
_____ the Experience of Space-time, the
______ Feeling of Nebula, the Vitality of
_______ Fungal Megafauna, the Knowingness
________ of Tree, the Is-ness of Rocks, the Libido
_________ of Magma, the Story of Song,
__________ the Movie of Philosophy,
___________ the animateness of all,
____________ the Lore of the understory

A radio story – a scientist who was developing dementia, (I think it was dementia?), developed a common symptom: inability to read analog clocks. He retaught himself, eventually, after reconceptualizing the clock as a “Superposition of Three Types”, (seconds, minutes, hours), which it is.

Symbol of symbol
Interval of time
Base unit of knowing
Divisions of measurement
Articles of code
Words to the wind
Transposition of figures
Portability of speech
Fixability of language